Michael Ascher

Toward a System of Microbial Forensics: from Sample Collection to Interpretation of Evidence

The threat of terrorist or criminal use of pathogenic organisms and their toxins remains a great concern in the United States. The anthrax letter attack of 2001 ([12][1]) raised the awareness of our vulnerability. It also demonstrated the need to perform microbial forensic analyses for attribution

West Nile Virus and Botulism Portal: A Case Study in Infectious Disease Informatics

Information technologies and infectious disease informatics are playing an increasingly important role in preventing, detecting, and managing infectious disease outbreaks. This paper presents a collaborative infectious disease informatics project called the WNV-BOT Portal system. This Portal system provides integrated, Web-enabled access to a variety of distributed data sources related to West Nile Virus and Botulism. It also makes available a preliminary set of data analysis and visualization tools tailored for these two diseases. This system has helped to demonstrate the technological feasibility of developing a cross jurisdiction and cross species infectious disease information infrastructure and identify related technical and policy-related challenges with its national implementation.

BioPortal: sharing and analyzing infectious disease information

Infectious disease informatics (IDI) is an emerging field of study that systematically examines information management and analysis issues related to infectious disease prevention, detection, and management. IDI research is inherently interdisciplinary, drawing expertise from a number of fields including but not limited to various branches of information technologies such as data integration, data security, GIS, digital library, data mining and visualization, and other fields such as biostatistics and bioinformatics. Funded by the NSF through its Digital Government and Information Technology Research programs with support from the Intelligence Technology Innovation Center, we have been developing scalable technologies and related standards and protocols, implemented in the BioPortal system, to deal with various data sharing and analysis challenges arising in the field of IDI. BioPortal provides distributed, cross-jurisdictional access to datasets concerning several major infectious diseases (of both humans and animals) West Nile Virus (WNV), Botulism, Foot-and-Mouth Disease (FMD), and Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD). It also provides access to test data collected from the BioWatch system, an air pathogen sensing system developed to detect airborne hazards. In addition to data access, BioPortal provides advanced spatial-temporal data visualization and analysis capabilities, which are critically needed for infectious disease outbreak detection and can provide valuable information to facilitate disease outbreak management and response. The intended users of BioPortal include public health researchers and practitioners at all levels of the government including international partners, analysts and policy makers; the general public and students in public health or related fields; and law enforcement and national security personnel involved in counter bioterrorism efforts and emergency preparedness and response.